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Two recent books – the memoir, Inheritance, by writer Dani Shapiro and the academic study, Random Families, by sociologists Rosanna Hertz and Margaret K. Nelson – give insights into adults who search and find their sperm donor or donor siblings. I’m interested in how their experiences are similar and different from those of adopted adults who search and reunite. My own story of helping my son at age twenty-six find his birth parents and their extended families is told in my book, Creole Son: an Adoptive Mother Untangles Nature and Nurture, forthcoming in March 2020.
Writer Dani Shapiro’s acclaimed memoir, Inheritance, narrates how she and she husband as a lark submitted samples to 23 and Me. Dani was 52, an only child, happily married with a teenage son, whose parents were dead. She grew up a committed Jew with a father from a prominent Jewish family. Dani, blond and blue-eyed, writes:
People had told me every single day of my life that I didn’t look like I belonged in my family—nor did I feel I belonged in my family—yet I didn’t stop to consider what this might mean. (p. 175)
Adoptees often feel they didn’t fit into their families, but, presuming the adoption is not a secret, others would never tell them so.
Shapiro, in her novels and prior memoirs, was obsessed with issues of identity and with family secrets. Yet she was unprepared to learn from the DNA test that she was only half Jewish and unrelated to her half sister from her father’s first marriage. Her beloved Jewish father was not her biological father. Through contact with a relative noted in the 23 and Me report, and with the use of internet resources, she quickly located the sperm donor, a retired doctor in Portland, whom she calls Ben Walden. Dani contacted him and within a year she and her husband are in a relationship with him and his family through email and in face to face meetings
Inheritance includes a lot of research on the beginning years of artificial insemination in the U.S. in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when its use was little regulated. As in adoption, infertility was often the incentive and secrecy the accepted norm.
Shapiro spins a well-written, compelling story that is reminiscent of adult adoption searches in a time of closed adoption records when children might not be told they were adopted until after they were eighteen and some were never told. Without the internet and inexpensive DNA testing, however, fewer of the adoptees born from 1940 – 1980 were able to find their birth families.
The recognition of how family secrets had a negative psychological impact on adoptees led to the current practice of telling children from their earliest comprehension that they are adopted. It also changed adoption practice from closed records to various types of open adoption all of which include information from birth families and the possibility of contact between adoptive and birth parents. The same process of increasing openness is happening now in regard to sperm (and egg) donation. [1]
Shapiro expresses a lot of ambivalence and fear about seeking her biological father. Even after meeting the sperm donor and his family in a wonderful reunion with lots of mutual acceptance, Shapiro still feels like “a stranger in a strange land.” Her feelings parallel the experience of many adoptees. Shapiro’s declaration reminded me of the experience of my own son. After his first phone call with his accepting birth mother, one who had told her other children about him, he said, “It was the strangest day of my life.” This alienation is a result of the separation of genetic inheritance and family nurturance.
Shapiro’s story raises anew the issues of nature versus nurture, and leads initially to an emphasis on the importance of genes. She finds a sperm donor and half sister, who are not Jewish, but both of whom she resembles, not just in appearance, but in personality, interests and sensibility. (In the documentary film Three Identical Strangers, which I discussed in a blog here in September 2018, the triplets who were separated at birth and adopted into families who were not told of the others’ existence, also stressed the traits they had in common in their early reunion). But Dani Shapiro acknowledges that her sperm donor will never replace the importance of the father who raised her in the Jewish heritage she so values.
What distinguishes Shapiro’s story from that of an adoption reunion is that she acknowledges that she may have many other half-siblings. Adoptees don’t have to face this issue. They have only two possible new extended families with a finite number of half siblings. Dani was the first one to contact her sperm donor, but as a medical student, his donated sperm could have been used numerous times. Since she knows that her birth father and his family want privacy, Shapiro faces an ethical dilemma:
If someone like me, stunned, traumatized, shocked, disbelieving, contacted me through one of the testing sites, asking how it was possible that we were listed as half-siblings, I couldn’t turn that person away. I was that person. (p. 247)
Shapiro never reveals how she might feel if a number of half siblings appear in her life.
Searching for half siblings of children conceived with the use of sperm banks is the focus of Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin by sociologists Rosanna Hertz and Margaret Nelson. Unlike the unregulated early days of artificial insemination described in Inheritance, sperm banks in the 21rst century have to register sperm donors who are given a specific number. A few years ago, those who bought sperm started making Facebook pages where anyone who used sperm from a same donor could find each other, even when the donor remained anonymous. These Facebook pages became the basis for the formation of networks of donor siblings and their mothers, some of whom remained only in on-line contact and some of whom have had reunions where they meet in person. In addition, some pairs of half siblings and pairs of mothers have formed tight bonds.
Hertz and Nelson interviewed children (age 10 to 28) born from the use of donated sperm and in addition 212 parents who had used donor sperm in 152 families with 154 children, They found that lesbian couples and single women were the major consumers. The authors focus on five networks, the largest of which had twenty-two families. Sometimes teenagers or young adults initiated the Facebook page, and from there reunions, and sometimes it was parents. In recent years, mothers with infants or toddlers born with donor sperm started to form networks with other mothers using the same sperm donor. This parallels adoption practice where parents of infants or young children may try to keep in contact with birth families, while adult adoptees usually take the initiative to search. Among both adoptees and donor recipients, many will choose not to search.
The authors discovered a variety of reasons that donor siblings decided to search with many different results. Some people joined the Facebook page and became part of a network, just out of curiosity or to find medical information. In one network, however, where parents found that many of their children were on the autism spectrum, they remained in the network to trade information and resources and to get support. Some parents of infants and toddlers joined a network in the hope that donor siblings would bring their children advantages in the future— a connection that might help them get a job or a place to stay when they traveled.
Hertz and Nelson are most interested in networks where the participants want to get to know each other and meet for a reunion and perhaps on gong meetings. These mothers, and/or their donor children. hope to create new family and community relationships. Through interviews and participation in some reunions, the authors find that there is often a honeymoon period where donor siblings and their mothers focus on similarities and begin to consider themselves extended family. Some who already have large extended families integrate donor siblings and their mothers with existing relatives. After a honeymoon period, however, the network may break down into smaller groups or dyads including only people who have a lot in common and want more intimacy.
In two of the networks, the donor joined. But these men (married and raising their own children) did not play an important role. The donor siblings were more interested in each other than in finding a father. For adult adoptees, however, the search usually focuses initially on finding birth parents. Adult adoptees and donor siblings are in a different situation. Those born through the use of donor sperm live with a birth parent and no one ever thought of the donor as a potential father. Those born from a sperm (or egg) donor never have to face the psychological issue of adoptees, many of whom feel that their birth parents rejected or abandoned them.
Adoption circles are only beginning to discuss the importance of finding whole or half siblings. In a recent memoir, All You Can Ever Know, Korean American adoptee, Nicole Chung, first finds her biological sister, with whom she forms a close and ongoing bond. She rejects her birth mother because of how she treated this sister. My son was most interested in finding his birth father, a relationship that soon became dysfunctional. But more than ten years later, he has almost daily contact with a half sister. Although they look alike, their lives are very different and they live three thousand miles apart. When I asked my son what kept them connected, he told me that they both grew up without their father. Together, they are trying to locate other of his children, their half siblings, and to create an extended family. In this way, they are comparable to donor siblings.
Hertz and Nelson make the cogent argument that donor children who live in small families without siblings, along with their mothers, are most likely to try to turn genetic bonds into family-like relationships. Their motivation is increased when they have little extended family, or relatives are geographically distant, The same is probably true in adoption, although we can add that adopted children who feel out of place in their adoptive family of whatever size may be more interested in both searching for, and trying to create, on-going ties with their biological relatives.
We meet lots of interesting people in Random Families, but the reader struggles to keep them straight. Hence, this book doesn’t have the emotional impact of Inheritance. Random Families, however, reminds us of the variety, complexity and novelty of these new kinds of relationships, and our inability to predict where they will lead in the future. The authors’ analysis is relevant to those in adoption who are trying to form new types of extended families combining birth and adoptive relatives. In my book I reflect on why I wished I had pushed for a reunion when my adopted son was younger:
[B]oth he and I would have had a biological and an adopted family, different for each of us but bringing a balance into our family life. My biological family was his adoptive one; his biological family could have been my adoptive one.
In Conclusion
Both Inheritance and Random Families focus on the importance of genetic inheritance, although in the end, both point to the influence of nurturance and individual choice. Dani Shapiro says:
I may have been cut from the same cloth as Ben Walden, but I was and forever would be Paul Shapiro’s daughter. . . . I was connected to him on the level of neshama [soul or spirit], which had nothing to do with biology, and everything to do with love. (219)
Hertz and Nelson say:
Within all five of the networks we studied, some parents and some children found modes of interaction that embody the values of validation and trust. . . . [These values arise] because something important has happened within connections that began with a conversation about genes and ended with choice. (215)
[1] Susan Dominus in The New York Times Magazine in its June 30, 2019 issue reveals that the California Cryobank, the largest sperm bank, since 2017 has stopped offering anonymity to new donors. Donors must now agree to reveal their names to their offspring when they turn 18 and to have some form of communication to be mediated at first, by the bank. Epilogue to a photo essay by Eli Baden-Lasar, “I’m 20. I have 32 Half Siblings. This is my Family Portrait.”
